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Patrick_Devine

1,602 karma · joined June 23, 2013

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Patrick_Devine··on Ask HN: Best open source way to run local open-weight LLMs in 2026?
How is Ollama pivoting to a "less open" direction? Everything is MIT licensed.
Patrick_Devine··on Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
Given the model was just republished by Google 15 minutes ago and we're going to have to redo everything (and everyone will have to redownload for all platforms -- not just Ollama), I'll just say that sometimes things don't work out exactly the way you want them to. :-D

That said, I think the gemma4:12b-nvfp4 model is pretty solid. It's been tuned with Nvidia's model optimizer. I've been waiting on the results for MMLU-Pro, but I'll have to retrigger that after reconverting.

Patrick_Devine··on Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
I realize this is a little confusing; we're working w/ the MLX team to bring MLX to other platforms, but we're not quite there yet. The `gemma4:12b-nvfp4` model is specifically for the MLX engine.

For the GGUF 4bit variant (i.e. non-macs) you'll need `gemma4:12b-it-q4_K_M` which I just pushed. You'll also need to upgrade to version 0.30.4 which we're just about to release (it's in prerelease and we're running through our last regression tests).

Patrick_Devine··on Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
I haven't yet pushed the MTP enabled gemma4 12b model for Ollama because in my testing I wasn't getting a performance bump. The other gemma4 MTP models should work OK right now, but there are some fixes we're just about to push. This is specifically for the MLX backend.
Patrick_Devine··on Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters
In my testing the Gemma 4 31b model had the biggest speed boost in Ollama w/ the MLX runner for coding tasks (at about 2x). Unfortunately you'll need a pretty beefy Mac to run it because quantization really hurts the acceptance rate. The three other smaller models didn't perform as well because the validation time of the draft model ate up most of the performance gains. I'm still trying to tune things to see if I can get better performance.

You can try it out with Ollama 0.23.1 by running `ollama run gemma4:31b-coding-mtp-bf16`.

Patrick_Devine··on SFO Quiet Airport (2025)
I wish they would do this when you're boarding the plane. I get that there is essential information that everyone needs to know, but if you're a frequent flier you've probably heard the "put your larger carry-on in the overhead bin and your smaller bag underneath the seat in front of you" hundreds, if not thousands of times.
Patrick_Devine··on All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)
Isn't this why NASA is developing the Electrodynamic Dust Shield [1] system?

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-dust-shield-success...

Patrick_Devine··on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all
If you're on a Mac, use the MLX backend versions which are considerably faster than the GGML based versions (including llama.cpp) and you don't need to fiddle with the context size. The models are `qwen3.6:35b-a3b-nvfp4`, `qwen3.6:35b-a3b-mxfp8`, and `qwen3.6:35b-a3b-mlx-bf16`.
Patrick_Devine··on Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview
They are nvidia-fp4 weights, but CUDA support isn't _quite_ ready yet, but we've got that cooking.
Patrick_Devine··on Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview
The 35b-a3b-coding-nvfp4 model has the recommended hyperparameters set for coding, not chatting. If you want to use it to chat you can pull the `35b-a3b-nvfp4` model (it doesn't need to re-download the weights again so it will pull quickly) which has the presence penalty turned on which will stop it from thinking so much. You can also try `/set nothink` in the CLI which will turn off thinking entirely.
Patrick_Devine··on Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview
Try it with mxfp8 or bf16. It's a decent model for doing tool calling, but I wouldn't recommend using it with 4 bit quantization.
Patrick_Devine··on Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
I noticed the same thing. I'm assuming they forgot to photoshop out the chinese characters.
Patrick_Devine··on I converted 2D conventional flight tracking into 3D
The Departing / Arrival airports plus a full track would be absolutely amazing.
Patrick_Devine··on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
5 years is normal-ish depreciation time frame. I know they are gaming GPUs, but the RTX 3090 came out ~ 4.5 years before the RTX 5090. The 5090 has double the performance and 1/3 more memory. The 3090 is still a useful card even after 5 years.
Patrick_Devine··on Mistral 3 family of models released
The instruct models are available on Ollama (e.g. `ollama run ministral-3:8b`), however the reasoning models still are a wip. I was trying to get them to work last night and it works for single turn, but is still very flakey w/ multi-turn.
Patrick_Devine··on Claude Is Down
The default ones on Ollama are MXFP4 for the feed forward network and use BF16 for the attention weights. The default weights for llama.cpp quantize those tensors as q8_0 which is why llama.cpp can eek out a little bit more performance at the cost of worse output. If you are using this for coding, you definitely want better output.

You can use the command `ollama show -v gpt-oss:120b` to see the datatype of each tensor.

Patrick_Devine··on Gemma 3 270M: Compact model for hyper-efficient AI
We uploaded gemma3:270m-it-q8_0 and gemma3:270m-it-fp16 late last night which have better results. The q4_0 is the QAT model, but we're still looking at it as there are some issues.
Patrick_Devine··on Ollama Turbo
Ollama only uses llamacpp for running legacy models. gpt-oss runs entirely in the ollama engine.

You don't need to use Turbo mode; it's just there for people who don't have capable enough GPUs.

Patrick_Devine··on Ollama's new engine for multimodal models
I worked on the text portion of gemma3 (as well as gemma2) for the Ollama engine, and worked directly with the Gemma team at Google on the implementation. I didn't base the implementation off of the llama.cpp implementation which was done in parallel. We did our implementation in golang, and llama.cpp did theirs in C++. There was no "copy-and-pasting" as you are implying, although I do think collaborating together on these new models would help us get them out the door faster. I am really appreciative of Georgi catching a few things we got wrong in our implementation.
Patrick_Devine··on Ollama's new engine for multimodal models
Wait, what hosted APIs is Ollama wrapping?
Patrick_Devine··on Gemma 3 QAT Models: Bringing AI to Consumer GPUs
The vision tower is 7GB, so I was wondering if you were loading it without vision?
Patrick_Devine··on Gemma 3 QAT Models: Bringing AI to Consumer GPUs
Ollama has had vision support for Gemma3 since it came out. The implementation is not based on llama.cpp's version.
Patrick_Devine··on Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]
My point was multi-images and pan-and-scan. We haven't implemented those yet in Ollama, but soon!
Patrick_Devine··on Gemma3 – The current strongest model that fits on a single GPU
There are some fixes coming to uniformly speed up pulls. We've been testing that out but there are a lot of moving pieces with the new engine so it's not here quite yet.
Patrick_Devine··on Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]
Not quite yet on Ollama, but hopefully we'll add this soon. Also, we didn't add the pan-and-scan algorithm yet for getting better clarity in the original image.
Patrick_Devine··on Detrimental Decibels: A Study of Noise Levels in Vancouver's SkyTrain System (2022)
When Skytrain first came out it was touted about how quiet it was vs. other metro systems. [1] The problem (as others have pointed out) is just the Mark I trains are 40 years old and the maintenance hasn't kept up with the track and the wheels. Things wear out.

[1] https://youtu.be/pTsSXdSjU1I?t=455

Patrick_Devine··on Railroad Tycoon II
I still have my boxed copy (along with everything Loki produced) in a big box in the garage.
Patrick_Devine··on Phi 4 available on Ollama
We ended up not publishing it as a library model just because it was leaked and not the official weights.
Patrick_Devine··on iTerm2 critical security release
It also doesn't render unicode characters correctly (specifically unicode block chars). And they refuse to fix is, so d. is kinda a moot point.
Patrick_Devine··on Ollama 0.4 is released with support for Meta's Llama 3.2 Vision models locally
I haven't looked at cogvlm, but if you mean doing bounding boxes w/ classification, I'd love to support models like that (like detectron2) in the future.
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